Walk Potato

Walk Potato

Inspiration and Initial Pitch

We have a lot of fitness apps on the app store but all of these apps are often just bookkeeping tools which only provide the statistics about what we have achieved so far. This is good to start with, but not sufficient to keep people motivated or punish them in case they become lazy and start procrastinating. A lot of people just waste time using their phones for entertainment. Watching YouTube videos, movies on Netflix, playing games are common activities most of the people spenda lot of time on, thus ignoring their fitness and becoming potatoes. We aim to build an app thathelps people strike a balance between fitness and digital relaxation. Ergo the name “Walk Potato”.An app for the couch potato who walks. Humans in general exhibit two kinds of behaviors.. Someprefer rewards to motivate them, while others prefer restrictions as the medium of controllingprocrastination. Our app target both these kinds of people. People can block the apps they thinkwhich they spend a lot of time on and also get rewards for walking consistently and thus motivate them to walk more to get more and more rewards. Our app is more about being proactive inmaintaining better fitness and enjoying life with occasional pizzas and beers rather than turning intoa potato and then working hard to get fitter.

Future Work

The feedback from the initial survey and from the app evaluation, we found some key additionswhich will add more value to the app and increase its user base. Some of these enhancementsinclude integration with social media like Facebook and twitter to add a competitive aspect to theapp. This not only makes the app even more fun but also keeps people motivated by looking atfriends achieving bigger goals. Other key feedback we received from Lulu eGames was to make abetter business plan. Apart from the just advertisements and discount coupons from localbusinesses, we need to have a better business model. One of the example can be where people canbuy potatoes on days when they are too busy so that they can still access the apps. We can evenmake a paid pro version where we can suggest users on which apps they should be blocking to meettheir goals, give them a better statistics of what their goals should be depending on the Body MassIndex (BMI). Such personalized assistance will help users stay motivated and focused.The main future goal is to release a completed application to the Google play store. Based on thesuccess of the application we would consider releasing iOS and web versions of the app.